- Supply confidence intervals. (“50% likely it’ll be done by date X, 90% likely by date Y.”) Estigator.com is great for helping construct and illustrate these.
- Demonstrate understanding of client/customer/manager priorities, frustrations, and necessary tradeoffs: show compassion and supply suggestions for where scope can be narrowed if needed.
I think this is huge. I've found that if you ask if they need to cut things from the scope to hit a deadline, and tell them you'll work with them to get a scope that is reasonable by the time they selected, it works wonders. Sometimes it turns out they really need a small thing to get their next project out, but they are asking for far too much.
IOW ... it's all ROI - you have to be able to speak to everyone in the room at "their level" about the costs/benefits of the whole operation (see https://antipaucity.com/2015/05/05/what-level-of-abstraction...)
I made my own text-based tool for this at one point, but I lost it when I switched jobs.
I would like to recreate it except more generally useful. I would also like to make it compatible with the SIPMath standard (which are an open standard for conveying empirical distributions, e.g. as business-relevant inputs to estimations, or the outcomes of them.)
There may be better tools out there, and I'd be happy to hear about them; this is the one I recommend only because I don't know of simple alternatives.
Can you explain why? At least for predicting expected task finish times, I feel like people use them interchangeably.
"Forecast" is an expected date that may change due to circumstances.
"Estimate" is how long something will take, regardless of circumstances.
If you say "I estimate 2 weeks", then the word "estimate" is often taken to mean "2 weeks, plus or minus 10%" (or some other fixed bound), when what you probably actually mean is "between 1 week and 6 months, but probably around 2 weeks".